The process of designing, developing and manufacturing a new product and the process of changing or adapting an existing product presents many challenges to product managers and engineers to bring the product to market for the least cost and within schedule while maintaining or even increasing product quality. Many companies are realizing that the conventional product design process is not satisfactory to meet these needs. They require early involvement of manufacturing engineering, cost engineering, logistic planning, procurement, manufacturing, service and support with the design effort. Furthermore, they require planning and control of product data through design, release, and manufacturing.
The correct and efficient execution of business processes within a company, e. g. development or production processes, is of enormous importance for a company and has significant influence on company's overall success in the market place. Therefore, those processes have to be regarded similar as technology processes and have to be tested, optimized and monitored. The management of such processes is usually performed and supported by a computer based process or workflow management system. One such process referred to throughout this patent pertains to FlowMark.TM., which is a trademark of International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation of Armonk, N.Y.
In D. J. Spoon: "Project Management Environment", IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. a, February 1990, pages 250 to 254, a process management environment is described including an operating environment, data elements, and application functions and processes.
In R. T. Marshak: "IBM's FlowMark, Object-Oriented Workflow for Mission-Critical Applications", Workgroup Computing Report (USA), Vol. 17, No. 5, 1994, page 3 to 13, the object character of IBM FlowMark as a client/server product built on a true object model that is targeted for mission-critical production process application development and deployment is described.
In H. A. Inniss and J. H. Sheridan: "Workflow Management Based on an Object-Oriented Paradigm", IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 3, March 1994, page 185, other aspects of object-oriented modelling on customization and changes are described.
In F. Leymann and D. Roller: "Business Process Management with FlowMark", Digest of papers, Cat. No. 94CH3414-0, Spring COMPCON 94, 1994, pages 230 to 234, the state-of-the-art computer process management tool IBM FlowMark is described. The meta model of IBM FlowMark is presented as well as the implementation of IBM FlowMark. The possibilities of IBM FlowMark for modelling of business processes as well as their execution are discussed. The product IBM FlowMark is available for different computer platforms and documentation for IBM FlowMark is available in every IBM branch.
In F. Leymann: "A meta model to support the modelling and execution of processes", Proceedings of the 11th European Meeting on Cybernetics and System Research EMCR92, Vienna, Austria, Apr. 21 to 24, 1992, World Scientific 1992, pages 287 to 294, a meta model for controlling business processes is presented and discussed in detail.
The "IBM FlowMark for OS/2", document number GH 19-8215-01, IBM Corporation, 1994, available in every IBM sales office, represents a typical modern, sophisticated, and powerful workflow management system. It supports the modelling of business processes as a network of activities. This network of activities, the process model, is constructed as a directed, acyclic, weighted, colored graph. The nodes of the graph represent the activities which are performed. The edges of the graph, the control connectors, describe the potential sequence of execution of the activities. The runtime component of the workflow manager interprets the process graph and distributes the execution of activities to the right person at the right place, e. g. by assigning tasks to a work list according to the respective person, wherein said work list is stored as digital data within said workflow or process management computer system.
In F. Leymann and W. Altenhuber: "Managing business processes as an information resource", IBM Sytems Journal, Vol. 32(2), 1994, the mathematical theory underlying the IBM FlowMark product is described.
In D. Roller: "Verifikation von Workflows in IBM FlowMark", in J. Becker und G. Vossen (Hrsg.): "Geschaeftsprozessmodellierung und Workflows",
International Thomson Publishing, 1995, the requirement and possibility of the verification of workflows is described. Furthermore the feature of graphical animation for verification of the process logic is presented as it is implemented within the IBM FlowMark product.
For implementing a computer based process management system, firstly the business processes have to be analyzed and, as the result of this analysis, a process model has to be constructed as a network of activities corresponding to the business process. In the IBM FlowMark product, the process models are not transformed into an executable. At run time, an instance of the process is created from the process model, called a process instance. This process instance is then interpreted dynamically by the IBM FlowMark product.